


Space and the Radiance

by voleuse



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 09:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17221433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/pseuds/voleuse
Summary: Time makes room for going and coming home.Eternity might be long enough for them.





	Space and the Radiance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nirejseki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/gifts).



> Set long before and long, long after the series.

i. _time says “let there be”_  
What came before, no one could say, but at the beginning of things, there was the Black Rider. Or, perhaps he was. Or, perhaps he had endured so long that time radiated from him like infinity. He had always been present, because he could always find one’s present. He had always already been there.

There was, though, at the edges of the Dark and the Light and the High and the Wild, a time when he was something in the shape of a man, but stretching the boundaries of such. (Was there **a** time, though? Was such a thing still possible, for beings such as he?) Before Mitothin, the businessman, the magnate, the lordling, the squire. Before the bespoke suits, before the heavy robes, before the armor, worn and well-used.

And at that time (though _that_ or _this_ seemed oft exchangeable), he had sung of the patterns of matter and void, of the rising and falling of the tide. He had sung stories until they became true. With the others, he had sung the universe into being.

Perhaps he had been known as Lokke. Perhaps, once, he had been Wild.

 

ii. _galaxy and eyes beholding radiance_  
Not often did the Black Rider have to articulate the way he experienced existence, but when another joined his ranks, he opted to diminish. The power that thrummed through him dimmed, and he shed the onion-skin folds of always already from the front of his mind.

He experienced time in one direction, and it itched.

When the Light’s pawn, Hawkin, fell, the Rider was there to catch him. And in the shape of a human again, bones and tendons and blood, the Rider fell to an old trick. He looked Hawkin in the eye and mirrored what haloed him like candlelight: his pain, his disappointment, his spite. He took those feelings and made them a part of his temporary, finite being, and that was when he first learned that there would be a last of the Old Ones.

The Rider shivered as he shed his human skin again, and felt the compression and stretch of the Dark and the Light and the High and the Wild as power redistributed and shifted, backwards and forwards and ever.

_Last_. As if there was a beginning and an end. Rather than last, this boy (this man, this infant, this youth, this archetype) was the center. Around him pivoted all else, including the Rider.

 

iii. _and death, and chance_  
The old ways encircled the world, and over time, Will learned the bends and twists of all of them. Cliffs eroded and reshaped by wind and waves. Walls demarcating the will of a nation. Pyramids hidden by vines and cautionary tales. A desert highway left to pine for the reality underlying nostalgia. 

Will saw them in his own time, but the trick of it was he could see them at their makings, their peaks, their declines. 

One winter solstice, he stood beneath a canopy of branches, lianas twining about him like an embrace. He breathed deep of the soil and sap, the scents telling him a thousandfold of stories. Those that lived here had marked the solstice differently than Will had, growing up in his own time. He could feel the echo of their rituals as if through a tulle curtain.

Then there was a ripple of cold and he was pulled into that time. The forest, instead of surrounding him, was the length of a plaza away, and the sound of forgotten instruments were sharp in his ears.

Will opened his eyes, and the Black Rider was there, with something like a smile on his face.

 

iv. _in time’s womb begins all ending_  
Herne did not always hunt the Dark, you see. Unto everything there was a season, and the pattern woven was sometimes a wheel. 

Will was the last of the Old Ones, and as such, his sacrifice--symbolic and impermanent in its damage--was a potent one. Will had seen endless attrition that would result from his escape, and so he had welcomed the Hunt’s attention.

He led a merry chase, of course. (A hunt only exists if someone decides to run.) His movement through time had been more like pirouettes than hops, and it was only when the Black Rider confronted him in that jungle that Will knew the time for his end (but not _end_ , simply the narrative the Wild had chosen to sing) had come.

Was it centuries, Will thought, that had passed since he had first met the Rider? Since they had been the last two left after that battle that was a season’s end? There was comfort in the familiarity of a face, a welcome that was always assured.

The Black Rider stretched his arms out, palms up, and Will clasped his hands and listened to the hounds as they called another season to its end.

 

v. _the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding_  
What goes unacknowledged, ever and ever, is that there cannot be an end. The human mind demands the shaping of a story, one that drives to a climax and settles into a coda, because what is endless isn’t something a person can grasp.

Will Stanton, last of the Old Ones, and the Black Rider, the Dark’s everlasting, stand together in what we think is the end. 

But focus on their hands, the warmth of their grips, the surety of their stances. See Will, who began as a child but stopped being one long ago, his hair disheveled, his lips chapped, his eyes wide. See the Black Rider, his age arrested from the beginning (but not _the beginning_ , of course), the red of his hair like a beacon, the sneer on his face a required pose.

This winter solstice, this Hunt, we demand to see as an ending. But the thing about rituals is they repeat. They entrench. They become meaningful in themselves.

Look at Will Stanton, hands clasped with the Black Rider. Instead of a coda, think of this as a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> Title, summary, and headings adapted from Ursula K LeGuin’s “[Hymn to Time](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/hymn-time).


End file.
